EXCLUSIVE Q&A: Retailers need to take big step into agentic AI
Agentic artificial intelligence solutions are becoming critical across the retail enterprise.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Mark Simon, VP of strategy for AI integration platform provider Celigo, agentic AI activities in retail. Simon works with major retailers in leading data integration and automation strategies.
The latest wave of artificial intelligence development, agentic AI builds upon the prescriptive capabilities of generative AI to streamline enterprise workflows even further by analyzing massive amounts of data in near-real-time and then automatically taking action based on the results.
[READ MORE: How agentic AI is finding its place in retail]
For example, an agentic AI pricing solution could adjust prices based on factors specific to a local store or an agentic AI chatbot could automatically issue a customer refund or flag a complaint for fraud depending on its deep-dive analysis of the situation.
What impact is agentic AI having on retail?
Agentic AI represents the next evolution in in online commerce. It is going to have the potential to completely change retail in a way, while also keeping things the same. Customers are still going to want to touch and feel products. The value of the in-person buying experience is still quite valuable, even as the online experience is going to very rapidly change.
The foundational buying experience is still going to be there, but with augmentation from the continued evolution of AI. There are going to be some winners here; companies that figure out the ‘secret sauce’ of agentic AI. They will embrace agentic AI and lead and invest in leveraging the emerging AI mechanisms and new buying patterns surrounding it and agentic-led purchasing to become big winners.
And there will be other companies that are going to fall behind the script. The future of agentic AI has yet to be written, but there's opportunity for both growth and falling by the wayside as retailers look at the emerging prospect of agentic AI.
What can retailers do to avoid losing out on agentic AI sales this holiday season?
Retailers need to ensure that their product information has been made available to and is being consumed by the major AI platforms. Some of the most recent methods that have gotten a lot of publicity include the agentic commerce capabilities OpenAI announced for ChatGPT in October.
Part of the process is as simple as making sure that you're taking advantage of product feed APIs such as the one offered by OpenAI. Most retailers have their best performance when they take the most ownership of those product feeds.
By that I mean they build product feeds using their internal teams and hand them over, because that opens the opportunity to optimize performance and treat their agentic AI strategy just like they would treat their traditional organic search engine optimization strategy or a paid ad campaign strategy.
What are the important agentic AI trends for the holiday season and going into 2026?
Some of the big retailers are now saying that 30% or more of their traffic is now coming from AI platforms. This means consumers are going in there, running queries and asking questions, and recommendations coming out of those queries are leading shoppers to retailers.
This holiday season is going to look different in terms of how customers are finding retailers online, but we're also in a transitory state. I think next year is going to look very different from this year.
There's going to be a lot of evolution between now and then, but customers will be using AI agents and the agentic AI models are a tool that buyers are using more to get advice and guidance. We really are just seeing the beginning of that transformation.
